About
I have been fortunate to engage in a wide variety of work – as a political scientist and quantitative scholar teaching at the University of Oklahoma and the University of Virginia; as a data scientist engaged in applied work with the Weldon Cooper Center for Public Service; as a researcher bridging applied and academic interests often with community partners; and as a consultant and leader creating UVA’s StatLab and envisioning and building out a Data Science Services team in the UVA Library.
I’m currently the Director of Research Data Services and the Social, Natural, and Engineering Sciences in the UVA Library, where I lead an amazing team of statistical and computational consultants, data curation and data discovery librarians, research software specialists, and subject librarians.
And I’ve been grateful to find many generous and creative partners along the way who’ve invited me to be part of collaborative work. Current partners include:
- Community Policy, Analytics, and Strategy Lab (CommPAS), co-directing a community-oriented research initiative with Paul Martin in the Batten School of Public Policy and the UVA StatLab,
- Public Interest Data Lab, leading a curricular lab in the Batten School of Public Policy designed to provide data science experience to students oriented towards justice,
- The Global Policy Center’s Humanitarian Collaborative, working with David Leblang on on predictive analytics for humanitarian goals,
- The Virginia Equity Center, partnering with Barbara Brown Wilson and the Democratization of Data Initiative to co-create a regional equity atlas with our community.
In the last five years, my interests have taken a sharp turn towards using data science to promote accountable governance, make visible racial and other social inequities, and impact public policy and movement building. More importantly, I hope I’m mentoring the amazing young people I get to work with at UVA to engage this work early in their careers.
Also, sometimes I play the mandolin, pretend I’m learning to play the banjo, and harbor a dream of joining a home-grown bluegrass band!
Research Projects
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Working to build and evaluate models of displacement that can be of use in humanitarian response.
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Part of UVA’s Batten School of Leadership and Public Policy’s Global Policy Center, in partnership with Save the Children, International
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Re-imagining UVA as a place where first generation and lower income students thrive
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Working with first-gen and low-income students to create research and knowledge for advocacy and change.
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Developing new ways for the public to engage political news, one that allows people to monitor the activities and attentions of government from a relatively high level, that encourages the consumption of information from multiple and varied sources, and that lowers the barriers to attentive citizenship in ways that reduce inequalities in time, education, and access.
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In other words, using machine learning to promote collective civic capacity.
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My book examines how citizens learn and use accountability standards during presidential campaigns.
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Other articles focus on how campaigns mobilize, congressional responsiveness to citizen participation, how social capital promotes policy accountability, how women’s political enagement is shaped by political structures, and more.
Workshops and Instruction
Library Projects
CV/Resume
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